Candelaria: Instead of ranking campuses, how can we make all schools successful

By Noel Candelaria

Sunday

Sep 8, 2019 at 1:01 AM

Texas is pretty good at ranking schools, and now it has simplified that process with the new A to F accountability ratings. Those campuses that got As and Bs presumably are considered successful, those that got Cs are considered so-so and those schools that got tagged with Ds and Fs are looked down upon as failures or near-failures.

Most of the state’s 8,000-plus school campuses got As or Bs, but the real question is, what will it take to make all of Texas’ public schools successful?

Educators are doing our part, and at the beginning of a new school year, we rededicate ourselves to doing everything within our abilities to give each of our students an opportunity to succeed. But we don’t work alone. Our classrooms and our students also need the support of elected officials at the state level to provide essential resources to improve the learning process, and those resources have been insufficient for a long time.

Last spring, the Legislature made a significant improvement by adding $6.5 billion to school budgets over the next two years. The extra money can be used to expand full-day pre-K for low-income children, boost high-quality reading and dual-language programs and provide more services for students with dyslexia, among other things.

And $2 billion set aside for teacher and school employee raises will encourage more high-quality and promising teachers to remain in the classroom and slow a turnover rate that has seen one-third to one-half of teachers leave the profession within the first five years of entering the classroom.

But this is just a down payment toward resolving a school funding crisis that has been building for years. The pay raises will only partially close the $7,600 gap by which teacher pay in Texas was lagging behind the national average and a $2,900 deficit (compared to the national average) in per-student funding.

To continue the work of making all our public schools successful and giving each of their students a chance to succeed, the Legislature now must do two critical things:

It must find a reliable, long-term source of education funding that keeps up with enrollment growth and equitably meets the classroom needs of all schoolchildren.

It must take steps to alleviate the effects of poverty – hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, inadequate health care -- that plague more than half of Texas’ public-school students and interfere with their ability to learn. Texas’ record of assistance to families in need is one of the poorest in the country. Millions of Texas children lack basic health care, and many have little to eat.

Education Commissioner Mike Morath praised the 296 high-poverty schools that received an A rating, and I commend the hard-working teachers and principals who were critical to their success. But high-poverty schools are still disproportionately represented among the D- and F-rated campuses.

All eight of the failing schools in Austin ISD, for example, have low-income student enrollments of more than 88 percent. Similar outcomes were found in Houston ISD and other districts.

And, remember, real success is more than just good STAAR scores. Real success is a young person’s development of the critical thinking skills that are so essential to success throughout a lifetime. That is the goal of educators, and it should be the ultimate goal of policymakers as well.

Noel Candelaria is president of the Texas State Teachers Association.

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